On Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 04:40:21PM -0500, Phil N wrote:
> When my postfix system sends a "bounced" message, the "from" entry is
> "<>" (nobody). How can I change who the message is sourced from? Some
> mail systems reject a message that is sent from "<>" and then I get to
> see the rejection in my inbox... I would use a canonical rewrite but my
> peabrain can't imagine the format for "userdomain address" (quote:
> userdomain is replaced by address.) :-)

In other words...
   
         When the receiver-SMTP accepts a piece of mail (by sending a
         "250 OK" message in response to DATA), it is accepting
         responsibility for delivering or relaying the message. It must
         take this responsibility seriously, i.e., it MUST NOT lose the
         message for frivolous reasons, e.g., because the host later
         crashes or because of a predictable resource shortage.

         If there is a delivery failure after acceptance of a message,
         the receiver-SMTP MUST formulate and mail a notification
         message. This notification MUST be sent using a null ("<>")
         reverse path in the envelope; see Section 3.6 of RFC-821.

The above is from RFC1123. which is now over 11 years old.

Ie, any site that is refusing to accept mail from <> is doing a
-serious- disservice to their customers, who will believe that their
mail was successfully delivered, when, in fact, it failed. If this is a
commercial ISP, inform their users that their provider is blocking their
mail. You can even tell the subscriber how to see this mail lossage
themselves: just have them send mail to a completely invalid AOL address
(like 'no-one-here-by-that-nameaol.com') and noticing they are never
told their mail was undeliverable.

Or, as RFC2505 says:

   The MTA MUST NOT refuse to receive "MAIL From: <>".

   The "MAIL From: <>" address is used in error messages from the mail
   system itself, e.g. when a legitimate mail relay is used and forwards
   an error message back to the user. Refusing to receive such mail
   means that users may not be notified of errors in their outgong mail,
   e.g. "User unknown", which will no doubt wreak more havoc to the
   mail community than spam does.

You should -not- try to make postfix behave any differently than it
does. Postfix behaves correctly: the systems refusing mail from <> are
broken. The idiots who run such servers are in the minority, though,
and changing the behavior of postfix will make it break for the
-majority- of other systems, which would be far worse. It's best to
apply a cluestick to the foreheads of the admins of the broken servers
and inform their users that they are losing mail.

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